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Series Description: Bill Moyers returns on-air and online in January 2012 with MOYERS & COMPANY, a weekly hour of compelling and vital conversation about life and the state of American democracy, featuring some of the best thinkers of our time. A range of scholars, artists, activists, scientists, philosophers and newsmakers bring context, insight and meaning to important topics. The series occasionally includes Moyers' own timely and penetrating essays on society and government. In a multimedia marketplace saturated with shallow sound bites and partisan name-calling, MOYERS & COMPANY digs deeper. As the Los Angeles Times put it in 2010, "No one on television has centralized the discussion of ideas as much as Moyers... He not only gives a forum to unusual thinkers, he is truly interested in what they have to say and who they are because he believes their ideas really matter. "

All Episodes

For years, high-ranking administration officials have spun through the revolving door between the White House and American big business. But how have they influenced the regulation of industries from which they came -- and American democracy as a result? This weekend, continuing our sharp multi-episode focus on the intersection of money and politics, Moyers & Company explores the tight connection between Wall Street and the White House with David Stockman, former budget director for President Reagan. Currently a businessman who says he was "taken to the woodshed" for telling the truth about the administration's tax policies, Stockman speaks candidly with Bill Moyers about how money dominates politics, distorting free markets and endangering democracy. "As a result," Stockman says, "we have neither capitalism nor democracy. We have crony capitalism." Stockman shares details on how the courtship of politics and high finance have turned our economy into a private club that rewards the super-rich and corporations, leaving average Americans wondering how it could happen and who's really in charge. "We now have an entitled class of Wall Street financiers and of corporate CEOs who believe the government is there to do... whatever it takes in order to keep the game going and their stock price moving upward," Stockman tells Moyers. Also on the show, Moyers talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and columnist Gretchen Morgenson on how money and political clout enable industries to escape regulation and enrich executives at the top. Morgenson warned of Wall Street's culpability in the widening income gap back in 2007 on Bill Moyers Journal. BillMoyers.com has that show -- and over a hundred more -- available for free viewing. [56 minutes]

How, in a nation as wealthy as America, can the economy simply stop working for people at large, while super-serving those at the very top? This weekend, in an encore broadcast of the premiere episode of Moyers & Company (check local listings), Bill Moyers looks deeper at America's economic disparity to investigate how it happened and who's to blame. His detectives: political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class. Through exhaustive research and analysis, Hacker and Pierson - whom Moyers regards as the "Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson" of economics - detail important truths behind a 30-year economic assault against the middle class. Moyers calls the book "the best account I've seen of how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1% over everyone else, putting our once and future middle class in peril." "I think a lot of people know that inequality has grown in the United States. But saying that inequality has grown doesn't begin to describe what's happened," Pierson tells Moyers. Hacker says, "It's not the haves versus the have-nots. It's the have-it-alls versus the rest of Americans." The show includes testimony of middle class Americans at a Senate hearing about the impact of hard times on families, as well as an essay on how Occupy Wall Street reflected a widespread belief that politics no longer works for ordinary people. Uncovering the ways Washington helps the rich get richer. Next on Moyers & Company. [56 minutes]

The life and work of Junot Diaz contains many worlds -- and that makes him all the more worth listening to. His books, including National Book Award finalist This Is How You Lose Her and Pulitzer Prize-winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, journey between the old and the new, and between the America that was and the America we're becoming. Born in the Dominican Republic, but raised in New Jersey and American to the core, Junot Diaz is a spotter of the future, a curator of the past, a man of the here-and-now. Diaz joins Bill Moyers on the next Moyers & Company (check local listings) to discuss the evolution of the great American story. Along the way he offers funny and perceptive insights into his own work, as well Star Wars, Moby Dick, and America's inevitable shift to a majority minority country. "There is an enormous gap between the way the country presents itself and imagines itself and projects itself, and the reality of this country," Diaz tells Bill. "Whether we're talking about the Latino community in North Carolina, a whole new progressive generation of Cuban Americans in Florida, a very out queer community across the United States, or an enormous body of young voters who are either ignored or pandered to, I think we're having a new country emerging that's been in the making for a long time, and that I think for the first time is revealing itself more fully to the entire country." [56 minutes]

Religious fundamentalists backed by the Right Wing are finding increasingly stealthy ways to challenge evolution with the dogma of creationism. Their strategy includes passing education laws that encourage teaching creationism alongside evolution, and supporting school vouchers to transfer taxpayer money from public to private schools, where they can push a creationist agenda. But they didn't count on 19-year-old anti-creationism activist Zack Kopplin. From the time he was a high school senior in his home state of Louisiana, Kopplin has been speaking, debating, cornering politicians, and winning the active support of 78 Nobel Laureates, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the New Orleans City Council, and tens of thousands of students, teachers and others around the country. On this week's Moyers & Company (check local listings), the Rice University history major joins Bill to talk about fighting laws and voucher programs that let publicly-funded creationist curriculum in the backdoor. Also on the program, journalist and historian Susan Jacoby talks with Bill about the role secularism and intellectual curiosity have played throughout America's history, a topic explored in her new book, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Free Thought. [56 minutes]

According to Mark Leibovich, Washington has worked for "a lot of people, a lot very good people, a lot of very bad people, and a lot of very mediocre people." And many who have made the town work for them. Reporting on Washington, D.C. as chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, Leibovich has written about the city's bipartisan lust for power, cash and notoriety. In his new book, This Town, he shares what the insiders of Washington are doing to the very notion of government of, by, and for the people, and details how Washington became an occupied city, its hold on reality distorted by greed and ambition. He pulls no punches and names names, revealing the movers and shakers and the deals they make, all in the name of crony capitalism. On this week's Moyers & Company (check local listings), Leibovich joins Bill Moyers to reveal what he has learned about a city where money rules and status is determined by who you know and what they can do for you. [52 minutes]

This week on Moyers & Company (check local listings), author and legal scholar Ian Haney Lopez joins Bill to talk about dog whistle politics and how racism has changed in America since the civil rights era. The dog whistle of racism, says Ian Haney Lopez, is "the dark magic" by which middle-class voters have been seduced to vote against their own economic interests. Politicians have mastered the use of dog whistles - code words that turn Americans against each other while turning America over to plutocrats. And yet, "Dog whistle politics doesn't come out of animus at all." Lopez tells Moyers. "It doesn't come out of some desire to hurt minorities. It comes out of a desire to win votes. And in that sense, I want to start using the term strategic racism. It's racism as a strategy. It's cold, it's calculating, it's considered, it's the decision to achieve one's own ends, here winning votes, by stirring racial animosity." "And here's a hard, difficult truth. Most racists are good people," he claims. "They're not sick. They're not ruled by anger or raw emotion or hatred. They are complicated people reared in complicated societies. They're fully capable of generosity, of empathy, of real kindness. But because of the idea systems in which they're reared, they're also capable of dehumanizing others and occasionally of brutal violence." Ian Haney Lopez, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, is a senior fellow at the policy analysis and advocacy group, Demos. [24 minutes]

This week on Moyers & Company (check local listings), more from author and legal scholar Ian Haney Lopez as he talks further with Bill about dog whistle politics - code words that use race to turn Americans against each other. Politicians manipulate deep prejudice to rouse hostility against minorities and the government, and summon support for policies that make economic inequality even worse. According to Haney Lopez, "This use of race has allowed an extreme faction of conservatives, those most dedicated to the power of big money, to the power of corporations to not only hijack American democracy, but to hijack the Republican Party." He reviews the use of the dog whistle in recent political history, from the "Southern strategy" developed by Republicans in the 60s and Democratic President Bill Clinton's welfare reform and anti-crime policies, to the tea party movement - which he says has legitimate issues but has "accepted the conservative line that was happened in their lives is really the fault of minorities" -- and current attacks on President Obama's Affordable Care Act: "The subtext is, 'Here comes a black man who exemplifies the way in which the Federal government is now by and for minorities." "Dog whistling" is going to evolve, Haney Lopez says "in a way that brings in certain portions of the Latino population, certain portions of the Asian population, that's what it's likely to do. Unless we start addressing this within minority communities, but also in terms of national politics, we should expect these sorts of racial provocations to continue to define our politics for the next decade, two decades, three decades." Ian Haney Lopez, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, is a senior fellow at the policy analysis and advocacy group, Demos. [24 minutes]

This week on Moyers & Company (check local listings), as Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower and Senator Dianne Feinstein, usually a staunch defender of the intelligence community, loudly and publicly speak out against the intrusion of internet spying, Bill talks with investigative reporter Julia Angwin, author of Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. Her book chronicles a cyberworld of indiscriminate tracking, where government and business are stockpiling data about us at an unprecedented pace. Today's headlines make Angwin's findings even more relevant and powerful. Julia Angwin set out to see if she could escape the dragnets that were secretly collecting even the most mundane details of her everyday life. She told Google good-bye, unfriended Facebook, unlinked from LinkedIn - and discovered just how difficult it is to untether the electronic umbilical cord and escape scrutiny. Reporters are a prime target for internet snooping, says Angwin, "Journalists are the canary in the coal mine. We're the first ones to seriously feel the impact of total surveillance, which means we can't protect our sources. But what happens next? What happens next is we're not good watch dogs for democracy. And that's a very worrisome situation." She wondered whether government snooping is the price of security: "I thought, 'Okay, let's see, maybe this is really worth it. Maybe we're going to find out that we're really safe.' So I looked at all the literature about government surveillance and crime and how much does it work. And what I found is, it's not particularly effective." Julia Angwin, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, covered the business and technology beat at The Wall Street Journal for thirteen years, and is now working for the independent news organization ProPublica. [24 minutes]

In this second of two programs celebrating the life and work of the late Maya Angelou, Bill Moyers revisits a 1988 documentary in which he and Angelou attended a conference on "Facing Evil," held in the Hill Country of central Texas. Evil was a topic about which Angelou, the victim of childhood rape and virulent racism, had a lot to say. Rape caused her to retreat into silence for five years. she said, and was "a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person more often than not introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. In my case I was saved in that muteness, you see, in the sordida, I was saved. And I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself." She recites the lyrics of a song she wrote for Roberta Flack about Angelou's crippled Uncle Willie, who made sure she and others knew their lessons and "left for our generation and generations to come a legacy so rich. " She reads from the poetry of African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar as well her own: "There in those pleated faces/I see the auction block/The chains and slavery's coffles/The whip and lash and stock./My fathers speak in voices/That shred my fact and sound/They say, but, sugar, it was our submission/that made your world go round.'' She tells the conference, "We need the courage to create ourselves daily, to be bodacious enough to create ourselves daily -- as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings," she says. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting, honorable." [24 minutes]

This week, in an encore presentation of Moyers & Company (check local listings), the Nobel Laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz says he's infuriated by America's growing inequality and at how the tax code has been manipulated and abused to place the burden on the earners of ordinary income -- instead of the rich and powerful most able to pay. "We already have a system that isn't working," he tells Bill Moyers. "... That has contributed to making America the most unequal society of the advanced countries... But he has a solution. Joseph Stiglitz recently published a call to action, a 27-page report for the Roosevelt Institute on how to reform our tax system and rebuild our country. "We can have a tax system that can help create a fairer society," he says. "Only ask the people at the top to pay their fair share. It's not asking a lot. It's just saying the top 1% shouldn't be paying a lower tax rate than somebody much further down the scale - [they] shouldn't have the opportunity to move money offshore." Stiglitz believes that taxes can be used as incentives: "If your taxes say we want to encourage real investments in America, then you get real investment in America... But I also believe that you have to shape incentives and that markets on their own don't necessarily shape them the right way." Now a professor at Columbia University, Joseph E. Stiglitz served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton White House, as chief economist of the World Bank and is currently president of the International Economic Association. He is a best-selling author with a worldwide following that includes presidents and prime ministers. [26 minutes]

Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist who's also an evangelical Christian, but in the face of those who use religion to deny the worldwide crisis of climate change, she believes that her faith is compatible with science. "...The New Testament talks about how faith is the evidence of things not seen," she tells Bill Moyers. "By definition, science is the evidence of things that are seen, that can be observed, that are quantifiable. And so that's why I see faith and science as two sides of the same coin." The daughter of missionaries, Hayhoe believes she, too, has a mission: "Caring about climate is entirely consistent with who we are as Christians. But over the last several decades...we have increasingly begun to confound our politics with our faith. To the point where instead of our faith dictating our attitudes on political and social issues, we are instead allowing our political party to dictate our attitude on issues that are clearly consistent with who we are... Climate change is a casualty of much larger societal issues. If we can get past the issue of rhetoric and politics, and actually start talking about what's in our hearts, I have seen amazing things happen in terms of moving forward to look at solutions that are consistent with the values that we have." Katharine Hayhoe teaches at Texas Tech University and is director of its Climate Science Center. She is the founder and CEO of ATMOS Research, a scientific research and consulting firm and co-author of A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions. A rising star of climate science, Hayhoe was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in 2014 and featured in the Emmy Award-winning Showtime documentary series Years of Living Dangerously. [26 minutes]

In the last four years, close to half the states in the US have passed laws restricting the right to vote, the most fundamental principle of democracy. A new nationwide effort to suppress the vote, nurtured by the Republican Party's desire to hold onto political power, fear and fierce resistance to inevitable demographic change, has hammered the country. Shelby County v. Holder, last year's Supreme Court decision revoking an essential provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, upped the ante and has encouraged many states to try to impose restrictive voter ID laws, as well as gerrymander congressional districts and limit registration and voting hours. The argument made in favor of this vast disenfranchisement is rampant voter fraud -- that people manipulate the system to cheat and throw elections. But in state after state, there is rarely proof of anyone showing up at the polling place and trying to illegally cast a ballot. This week Bill Moyers talks with an attorney and journalist, each of whom has been deeply involved in the ongoing vote suppression controversy. Sherrilynn Ifill is president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a noted civil rights litigator whose work has included landmark voting rights cases. She notes that, "A core tenet of the civil rights movement rested on the centrality of voting as an expression of citizenship and dignity in our republic." Ari Berman is a contributing writer for The Nation magazine and author of the upcoming book, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. "Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting," he has written, "a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots." [26 minutes]

In the wake of grand juries in Missouri and New York's Staten Island deciding not to indict white police officers in the deaths of unarmed African Americans, Moyers & Company presents an encore broadcast of Bill Moyers' conversation earlier this year with journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. First telecast in May 2014, Coates had just written a cover story in The Atlantic magazine, provocatively titled "The Case for Reparations." It urged that we begin a national dialogue on whether the United States should compensate African Americans not only as recognition of slavery's "ancient brutality" -- as President Lyndon Johnson called it - but also as acknowledgement of all the prejudice and discrimination that have followed in a direct line from this, our original sin. His words remarkably prescient in the light of recent events, Coates explained to Moyers, "I am not asking you, as a white person, to see yourself as an enslaver. I'm asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in in the past. And that covers everything from enslavement to the era of lynching, when we effectively decided that we weren't going to afford African Americans the same level of protection of the law... "There are plenty of African Americans in this country-- and I would say that this goes right up to the White House-- who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy." Reparations, Coates said, are "What the United States, first of all, really owes African Americans, but not far behind that, what it owes itself, because this is really about our health as a country... I firmly believe that reparation is a chance to be pioneers. We say we set all these examples about liberty and freedom and democracy and all that great stuff. Well, here's an opportunity for us to live that out." Ta-Nehisi Coates has written for many publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. He is a senior editor for The Atlantic magazine and author of the 2008 memoir, "The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood." [24 minutes]